The Facebook IPO was supposed to be the biggest thing ever yet it turned into one of the biggest flops. While most investors ended up losing money as the stock price fell, a few selected ones did quite well. This is the story of how that happened.
Now that Google Reader is dead, Google has just announced that they’re dropping XMPP support with their new “Hangouts” messaging service and replacing it with a proprietary protocol.
If you’re not aware, XMPP is also known as Jabber and is the basis of the Facebook chat feature and was also part of Google Talk and Google Wave. As Gruber sarcasticly says, “Open always wins.” In other words, Google talks about open, but then does the opposite.
Laurent Eschenauer has it right, “we do not need Google to build the open web for us. We are developers, and hacking the future is what we do best.”
Adrienne So in Slate claims that hoppy beer is awful—or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation.
My wife would probably agree, at least about the awful part, but certainly not about the reputation part. The thing to keep in mind that hoppy IPAs are just one style of craft beer. There are lots of styles under the craft beer umbrella; the whole movement is a reaction to the monolithic “light lagers” of the megabreweries. If you’re a craft beer lover you should know better than to hand an IPA to a newbie, but you don’t have to. There are so many other great craft beers out there for them to discover and enjoy.
A while back The New Yorker asked Aaron Swartz to design an anonymous inbox to make it safer for whistle blowers to get their stories to journalists. The resulting system, called Strongbox, is now up and available for use.
Bruce Schneier writes in The Atlantic that the most important thing for us to do is refuse to be terrorized.
If you’re an introvert like me, you’ve gotten a lot of “advice” from extroverts over the years about how you should be more outgoing yadda yadda yadda. But there’s nothing wrong with us, we’re just different.
Jon Bell has the McDonald’s Theory – stimulating creativity by suggesting the worst possible thing and letting people come up with better ideas to avoid it.
Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha fame had the chance to visit the archives of German polymath Gottfried Leibniz in Hanover. Despite being almost 300 years old, his papers are still in good condition and show some of the mind of someone who was interested in many things beyond mathematics.
My Comic
